Lanterna Rally

Author: Diane Sahms-Guarnieri

Publisher: Anaphora Literary Press

Published: 2015-11-15

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 168114218X

“The familiar Gospel song may reassure us that, ‘His eye is on the sparrow,’ but for those at the battered edges of our society, too often it doesn’t seem that way. Here, Diane Sahms-Guarnieri catches sight of ‘a sparrow by its own forgotten self,’ and that sparrow stands in for other ‘forgotten’ ones: the homeless, the wrecked, the ill, a family of forebears ‘visited’ by comprehensive Job-like ‘Misery.’ Even as she shows us ‘light’s battered edges,’ however, Sahms-Guarnieri makes us sharply aware of ‘life playing/ disharmoniously and harmoniously’: love so close it’s ‘like being safely snug inside/ the lining of another’s skin’; earth itself surrendering ‘to each/ sunset’ ‘in a thankful swaying sort of way’; a soul snatched up animistically, ‘lifting, lifting, lifting into light.’ These compelling poems leave us disquieted, as much by beauty as by sorrow.” —Nathalie F. Anderson, Author of Quiver; Professor, Swarthmore College “Think of the spirit of place as the frame of memory shaping language, of the perpetual soliloquy of being who you are in counterpoint with echoing phrases others have uttered at or to you, and you will have some idea of the chant and enchantment of the poems gathered in Light’s Battered Edge. There are some hard truths in these poems—about abusive spouses, about the wear and tear of caring for others. But underlying it all is the sense of what love really means.” —Frank Wilson, Books, Inq.; The Epilogue